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Military Acquisition and Procurement

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Maintaining a military that is prepared to face uncertain future security challenges often requires the acquisition and procurement of new and technologically advanced equipment, which is a major expense for any nation. For decades, RAND has researched and evaluated military acquisition and procurement activities, providing essential recommendations to allow military decisionmakers to manage costs and streamline the acquisition process more effectively.

The DLA supplies common military items to the armed services and others while seeking to achieve customer service goals and minimize cost. When demand for an item rises unexpectedly, providing effective customer service is challenging, and when demand falls, the DLA can be left with the sunk cost of excess inventory. Continuous attention to supply chain agility is needed.

Explore Military Acquisition and Procurement

This report aims to support universalisation of the Arms Trade Treaty by identifying barriers and obstacles to its ratification and by generating a set of proposals to overcome these barriers at the national, regional or international level.

NATO's cyber acquisition process must be adaptive, capable of attracting new entrants and incorporating new technologies. This project aims to define the challenges NATO faces in adjusting its cyber capability development and acquisition processes and make recommendations on how to address them.

Using insights from interviews, legislation, and policy, this report develops a decision framework that will help the U.S. Air Force's Director of Acquisition Career Management improve management of the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund.

This tool documents key but enduring aspects of how the Navy implements the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process so that action officers and Navy leaders can successfully navigate and effectively contribute to the process.

Rapid acquisition practices that worked during recent wars may not easily translate to peacetime endeavors. Enthusiasm for rapid acquisition must be tempered by an understanding of the circumstances that made it work and the downsides that were accepted in wartime.

Rising costs and delivery delays might mean that Tunisia should look at potential alternatives to the UH-60M Blackhawk helicopter. This report assesses potential alternatives that are cost-effective and capable of performing the assault mission.

What are the U.S. Navy's options for extending the service lives of operational ships by adopting the concepts of modularity and flexibility in ship design? Researchers examine the concepts of modularity and flexibility, technological trends, the current geopolitical context, and lessons from past incorporation of new missions and technologies into naval ships.

Defense planning needs a new approach to identify strategies that perform well over a wide range of threat and funding futures. RDM is designed to inform decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty and complexity, and as shown in an application to the munitions mix challenge, could prove quite useful.

To support development and integration of earned value management (EVM) competencies across the defense acquisition workforce, RAND researchers surveyed the U.S. Department of Defense EVM-analyst workforce and described it across several dimensions.

This interactive, web-based tool accompanies The Army's Local Economic Effects, and maps the economic effects of national-level U.S. Army spending for each state broken down by fiscal year (2012-2014) and congressional district.

This study provides insight into the role and value of contractors and challenges facing the government as it seeks to best integrate the skills and capabilities it needs; these skills are increasingly principally resident in the private sector.

This appendix to The Army's Local Economic Effects provides descriptions of the overall economic effects for each state, details by fiscal year from 2012-2014, and a parsing of the data by congressional district for Alabama through Minnesota.

This appendix to The Army's Local Economic Effects provides descriptions of the overall economic effects for each state, details by fiscal year from 2012-2014, and a parsing of the data by congressional district for Mississippi through Wyoming.

The Boeing-Lockheed Martin team filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office asserting that the U.S. Air Force's selection of Northrop Grumman to build the Long Range Strike-Bomber was fundamentally flawed. Work on the program, valued at approximately $80 billion, is now paused.

RAND's three federally funded research and development centers apply research capital they have developed over the years to help decisionmakers solve problems and often save money as well. This publication lists and briefly summarizes some RAND projects undertaken over the past ten years that have helped save the government money or that have identified ways to do so.

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Researcher Spotlight

Senior Physical Scientist

Chris Pernin is a senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Since joining RAND in 1999, Pernin has been involved with or led a wide range of national security and domestic research projects on decisionmaking, institutional reform,…

Research Leader

Dr Giacomo Persi Paoli is a Research Leader in RAND Europe's Defence, Security and Infrastructure Group where he leads the National Security and Resilience research portfolio. Since joining RAND Europe, Giacomo contributed to several research projects for high profile clients such as the United…

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